Crosswalk.com aims to offer the most compelling biblically-based content to Christians on their walk with Jesus. Crosswalk.com is your online destination for all areas of Christian Living – faith, family, fun, and community. Each category is further divided into areas important to you and your Christian faith including Bible study, daily devotions, marriage, parenting, movie reviews, music, news, and more.

In Women in Abusive Relationships: The Good Daughter Syndrome,
we nailed down two ideas: that spiritual health without psychological
health is like a gym without exercise equipment, and that one's
psychological health has a great deal if not everything to do with how
and by whom one was raised.

The great difficulty with psychological healing is that it's like
trying to look at your own eyeballs. You're too close; you have exactly
the wrong perspective for the task. This is the great value of
psychological counseling: It involves an objective person
listening to you, someone with virtually no vested interest in your
story beyond helping you explore and understand it. Perfect! When else
in your life do you get to talk to someone who is utterly objective
about you---who has no role or history whatsoever in your personal
life---and who never, ever turns the conversation into something about them?

Verily, is seeing a psychologist is the greatest thing in the
history of totally lopsided conversations. (Not that you can get your
insurance to pay for such counseling anymore, since trying means
landing before someone who'll be handing you a prescription for an
antidepressant "medication" before you can say, "But I'm trying to actually
get better, you shameless hack." So now, or certainly increasingly,
only the rich can afford competent psychological counseling. Which kind
of works out, since being rich tends to make people crazy.)

If you're a woman in an abusive relationship, you've got to take
seriously the truth that something about the way you were raised has
left you trapped in the terrible cycle in which you are now spending
out your life. If you don't face the fact that your past is largely
determining your present, you'll never be able to create for yourself a
better future. You'll be forever stuck reacting to the past, rather
than being, as a healthy person is, proactive about the future. You
will continue to be a victim of your own life, because you will
continue to lack the objective perspective critical for realizing the
sort of radical change of which you are now in such tremendous need.

None of which is to say that every woman in an abusive relationships
grew up in an abusive household. Human psychology is hardly that
cause-and-effecty. Some women in abusive relationships grew up watching
their father beat their mother; some didn't. It's a complex world; we
all have very complex emotions and psychological responses to it.

But you can bet on one thing: If you're in an abusive relationship, you are
living out your loyalty to whatever it was your parents taught you
about themselves, reality, and you. Tolstoy was right when he said that
every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But at the bottom of it
all, every unhappy person is unhappy for the same reason: They are
fervently devoted to their parents. For better or worse, we all love
our parents like we don't (and can't) love anything else in this world.
We love them in ways we can't even begin to understand.

Well. We can begin to understand that. If we try---if we really put
in the effort it takes to understand what about our loyalty to our
parents is presently good for us, and what about it is bad---then we
can, finally, fully embrace the former, and kiss the latter good-bye.
And for the sake of own mental clarity and health, that's exactly what
we must do.